I Heart Israeli Religious HippiesAnd Upstate New York

For Yom Kippur I did not wear a suit and tie. Instead, I dressed in all white, Israeli Religious Hippie style. I wore synthetic sandals with white socks, a white knit yarmulka, a white shirt and white double-knee work pants. Why the reinforced knees? For the hishtahhawaya (prostration), of course!

I did full on-the-floor bowing for the first time in my life this year. I never did it before because my father never did it before, but then he told me that could very well be simply because in his shul growing up only the cantor ever did it; and he wouldn't consider it an affront to family tradition if I started.

In R' Avraham ben haRMB"M's Kitāb Kifāyä al‘Ābidīn (Seifer haMaspiq le‘Ovedey H') [the Comprehensive Manual for the Worshipper of God], he talks about how many Islāmic practices — particularly spiritual practices of the Ṣūfī mystics — were preserved by them from Pre-Ħurban Judaism, when we, 'in our many sins', lost track of them. One of these practices was what he calls (as pronounced by contemporary Rambamists) hishtahhawaya (השתחוויה), full prostration (not bowing at the waist as we do it today), which he mandates for many specific times during prayer, not limited to the ‘Amida and Borkhu.

In fact, either him or his father, the Rambam, explained the description in Pirqey Avot that in the Beit Hamiqdash the people would stand crowded together but prostrate themselves with room to move to mean that they would stand in long horizontal rows with space between them, the way Muslims arrange themselves when they daven!

So anyway, for Yom Kippur I went home to my "Out Of Town" adopted hometown in Upstate New York (instead of home to my parents in Brooklyn, where I was for Rosh Hashana), and did hishtahhawaya for the first time. Unlike in other shuls I've been to on the ^High Holy Days, no one put down any plastic bags or newspaper to separate between their knees (or face) and the floor — probably because the entire floor of my Upstate shul was carpeted, so it didn't count as "prostration on a bare floor".

It was amazing how packed the shul was — it was almost full! I'd never seen more than maybe at most 50 people there, and usually just a bit more than a minyan (barely a minyan on weekdays, if lucky) — but during Kol Nidrey and Ma‘ariv, and Ne‘ila there were between 250 and 300 people, men and women, packed into the shul sanctuary! Now, if only they would come to shul more often...